


Dance Of The Little Swans

by orphan_account



Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: 70s, Character Study, Gen, Sort Of, Spy! Roger, What-If, a lot of pov not a lot of dialogue, and also roger isn't his real name, but to be clear the USSR was Not A Good Place, if you like soviet aesthetics this is for you, not very accurate timeline but bear with me, this is a mess pls don't judge it too hard, this is essentially a collection of scenes for a potential story, тоска
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21577090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Homesickness isn't something he'd thought he'd ever experience.A collection of loosely-connected writing on Roger as a spy, reflecting on his life as he's undercover in London.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 14





	Dance Of The Little Swans

**Author's Note:**

> eventually i might turn this into a full work, but for now,here are some drabbles! not very linear storytelling, so do forgive me, but i hope you enjoy nevertheless.   
> A few songs that go along with this well:   
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peQqsTZ9958  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBqqUOZITGo  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7Axrs6f7lA

Air stale, room pecked by dust. The sun doesn’t grace them that day as much as it pays a short visit, not unlike an estranged uncle at a funeral that absconds after a few obligatory minutes, leaving them in the familiar cloudiness of London. Sprawled out on the couch, Brian can feel his brain decaying from the silence. For the amount of people who seemed to rip their flyers off the bulletin board, you’d think at least someone would find a minute in the midst of their routine to try and audition, but no.

Was it the inherent uppity of the university? Did they not put enough flyers up? Or, much more likely: would anyone in their right mind be doing anything else on top of a degree in chemistry or physics? Well, maybe Brian’s a bit of a special case in that regard (and a masochist, depending on who you ask). Fact remains fact, the day’s coming to an end, and the door remains closed. Hours crawl on, amps and instruments forgotten in the corner. He doesn’t know how long they’ve been sitting there, and he doesn’t _w_ ant to. 

At some point, Tim turns on the radio. It registers barely above a strong whisper, but he’s able to hear the music play loud and clear over the static of this boring, everlasting day, and eventually the small box becomes the only unit of measurement in this tiny sandbox universe that boredom has created. There’s enough time lapsed for him to recount his entire life, the chances of a wormhole actually existing, the incredulous amounts of assignments from some of his lectures, and whether he should’ve fucked off to somewhere far away from London when he still had the chance. Maybe he should be doing something else. Maybe. Brian’s a dreamer, not a realist.

A sharp knock on the door kicks him out of limbo and back into life. Tim mutters an indifferent “come in”, and Brian’s eyes finally light up with hope for something, anything, to change in this incredibly boring day.

* * *

The plane finally touches down. It’s only when they’re out of the aircraft, bombarded by advertisements, cafes and gargantuan crowds that it hits him. They made it. They’re in London. Before he can really take it all in, he and the other dancers are shoved away by the guards, and promptly placed into inconspicuous, pavement-coloured cars. 

Still, no amount of training or photographs could prepare him for this. Thinking back to it, the initial warnings and comments of the bureau seemed strange and unneeded at the time, but he realizes almost instantly how quick someone could get lost in this. 

He allows awe to overtake his senses for a few seconds. He must look like a complete idiot, because the man that bumps into him gives him a dirty look.

He’s halfway to mouthing the first syllable before he remembers who he is, and promptly tries to adjust, and apologize in English.

There’s tension, surprise, confusion, and _fear_ staring back at him in this forty-something year old man. He doesn’t know what this means, but he doesn’t want to stick around to find out. Before he can say anything, he quickly catches up with the rest.

With one hand in his hair, the other holding on to a battered wallet and a squished pack of cigarettes, freshly brought into existence 18-year-old ballet dancer Roger Meddows Taylor enters London.

* * *

Brian’s just a bit taken aback by the amount of confidence he exhibits, but nevertheless relieved. The last drummer they had in had left around an hour ago. There’s something odd about him as well though, and he can’t quite place it. He’s just as “peculiar” as any other university student, clothes and hair straight out of a sleazy fashion magazine, daring bright and messy. _And yet_. His presentation and bravado place him as a typical party animal, _and yet_ his posture’s more collected, rigid, and eyes fixed in a sort of passive glare, not unlike a taciturn watchdog. It throws him off, to say the least. Definitely not someone he’d typically see in the natural sciences department.

“You lot looking for a drummer?” Their intruder scouts the room with an even gaze, looking right through them. 

Tim vaguely gestures for him to come on in. “Aye, you’re just in time. We were about to pack up.”

“Splendid. My kit’s in the van.” He exclaims as he’s already going back through the door, with a spring in his step.

Something’s off about his accent. He speaks just as any Central Londoner would, but with a harsher undertone, as if struggling to find the right sounds. Brian doesn’t think much of it, not since he has to talk and listen to so many people from all over the UK here anyway. Maybe it’s some type of Northern thing he doesn’t know about.

From there, things go in silence, the aforementioned human fountain of confidence seemingly only being able to reply in curt sentences and vague hums. Their attempts at smalltalk fall painfully flat, as the most they can get out of him is an occasional “Yeah” or “Hmm.” But he does work quickly and efficiently, as opposed to the dozen or so newbies before him who kept slipping and dropping things with trembling hands like they’d been asked to slap the dean. He’s got a real ear for rhythm and adjusts seamlessly, no matter how much they seem to change course or pace within what is supposed to be one song. Well, Brian supposes they don’t have to be friends. He’s got what it takes to play the drums, and that’s all they need.

And he plays, alright. With more energy than they’ve seen all day for sure. Even if he’s a little fast-paced at times, it stirs life in the room, and soon they switch from mellow and easy-going ballads to something a little heavier, quicker more experimental. Even though his fingers feel more bruised than usual by the end of it, there are all sorts of new ideas bubbling and taking form inside his head, something he hasn’t experienced in months.

Brian’s almost done packing up the amps when Tim decides to speak up yet again, prodding at the concrete-thick coating of awkwardness in the room.

“Aaand your name is-“ 

“Roger.”

“And do you go here?”

“Yeah.”

Tim blinks, seemingly taken aback by the utter lack of, well, anything. “Oh… uh, well, nice to properly meet you, Roger. I’m Tim, and this is Brian.” He points vaguely in his direction, though Brian would really much rather his bandmate didn’t involve him in an awkward, primary-school level “let’s get along” shenanigan right now. 

_That_ makes Roger avert his gaze finally, as he takes a long, hard look at Brian’s face and his dark cloud of a hairdo with a confused expression.

“Don’t take this the wrong way… but your hair reminds me of a bird’s nesting that I’ve had to study in class recently.” He finally says, his tone so serious Brian’s not quite sure that Roger himself realises that this was not, in fact, a compliment. He can’t help but chuckle.

“Definitely haven’t gotten _that_ before, I usually just get told I look like a poodle.”

“We’re not talking about dogs.”

“Well if we’re going by _bird analogies,_ you’re a pigeon.”

“But if I’m a pigeon… you’re definitely a crow.” The drummer concludes, a theory Tim seems to support wholeheartedly, and soon they’re listing off different bird types, something Roger proves to be quite good at, and as they learn in the process of this incredibly pointless conversation, he is in fact a biology major at their university.

By the time they’re finished packing up and getting _friendly reminders_ that their time in the studio is up, the tension is no more.

Roger twirls the drumsticks between his fingers, distracted. His eyes stop at Brian, and for a split second, his expression seems to tense up. “Are you sure we haven’t met before? You look familiar.”

Visibly confused, he opens his mouth as if he wants to say something else, but it goes just as quickly as it comes “…Nothing I remember, no.”, leaving Roger to mutter something Brian doesn’t catch under his breath. 

Later that day, the band leaves the building with a new drummer.

* * *

It’s been a long day, between lectures and revelations. He moves akin to a turtle in a crowd of rabbits, trying to not get hit by the occasional hasty soul out and about on the street. The setting sun envelops the passageway in a weak glow, painting the fallen leaves with a thin layer of gold. He doesn’t bother to run and catch the tube, instead enjoying the gust of wind on the station and the quiet that’s slowly taking over.

Footsteps. Quick and light.

There’s someone at the bench, staring intensely at a wall. His head tilts in Rogers direction with the fluidity of pancake batter.

There is nothing special about him. Roger’s been seeing this man out and about every day. Maybe he wears a differently colored shirt, sometimes he’s balding, sometimes shorter than Rog or taller, but he always disappears at construction sites or office buildings, acting as filler in pubs and parks, maybe with a girl or a kid. He laughs in a very typical way, with a strong Southern London accent and a breath that reeks of cheap beer when he’s drunk. Today, something’s off about him.

Their eyes meet. For a second, Roger feels something sinister, yet familiar creep up his spine, and the two men stare at each other with a sense of mutual unease, making quite the peculiar picture for a bystander. Something about his gaze takes him back to a very familiar room. A burgundy bureau, with bald men in tight suits, looking like supermarket chicken wrapped in plastic, chicken with the eyes of vultures.

He decides he’s walking that day.

The tube feels empty, on an odd hour of the evening when the workday isn’t quite over.

* * *

_Despite the whistling and bustling snowstorm outside, the room feels stale and hot, and he’s sure that he’s not the only one having trouble keeping his heavy blazer on. The men at the mahogany table, looking like uncooked supermarket chicken in tight grey suits, all sit with arms crossed and eyes crinkled, expecting. He’s sure that were it not for his hair, he’d blend into the wall completely, and the stark emptiness that radiates off their eyes confirms that._

* * *

When Freddie is introduced to Smile, Roger takes to him like glue.

This isn’t surprising, given that someone as eccentric and approachable as Freddie gathers people around his persona in herds, but it’s rare that anyone manages to be as in-tune with his tempo as Roger. Different in many ways and similar just as much, it’s not long until they become friends, and even less time passes until they’re scamming whoever and selling whatever at the Kensington stall.

So naturally, it’s left up to Freddie to notice most of his oddities. Like how Roger always seems to know if someone’s about to shoplift, or how he’s able to turn off his abrasiveness and short-fused temper whenever he needs to blend into the background and _really_ focus. The same man who could down three shots in one breath and bring a different girl home almost every day of the week was also at times so quiet and removed from everything, you’d think he’s actually two people in one 20-something skin.

* * *

He’s standing on the balcony, gazing at the darkening streets of London while finishing a pack of “Памир”, the cigarettes he found in his jacket two weeks ago. 

He almost spat them out at first. The tobacco burns in the depths of his throat like crude ash, the filter letting all kind of junk he doesn’t want to think about pass through, and the thin sticks themselves look like they’re about to fall apart from all the travel they had to endure. Nevertheless, it’s free and it reminds him of times when he actually wore that jacket, so he takes it, and tries not to concentrate on the weird sensation too much.

Freakishly tall buildings, cars that look like ant colonies from afar, and the distant smoke factories. He can’t actually see much of it from Kensington, and the contrast to the familiar apartment blocks that would shield the sunsets and sunrises is almost painful. The sun starts to disappear. London’s industrial backbone is nothing but a smudge of black paint on its canvas, so small and insignificant that you will never know it’s there unless you look for it. Sludging, the first street lamps turn on. The silhouettes disappear behind the orange light.

Roger never thought he’d miss it quite as vividly as he did now. Not when he cursed the monotone of greys that drove him insane, not when they’d get told off for practicing in the music room, not when some of his older and more outrageous friends would get arrested for nothing more but “looking weird”. His thoughts drift out the school gates, down the streets. Up the alley, shooing the pigeons away, crossing the old playground with the broken swings. Entering the building, taking the lift. The last floor.

They left silently and quickly. The bureau was known for its rash and unexpected changes in opinion, and he couldn’t even give half of them a proper goodbye before it was time to leave his old apartment block behind. He didn’t take anything in on his last day, his last trip to the market, his last ride on the subway. It had all seemed so mundane and disgustingly desaturated.

Guilt crept in after a few years, like a serpent. Did he deserve to be here? Deserve to enjoy this freedom? The freedom that all of them wanted, what they talked about in breaks, star-struck and full of dreams.

He doesn’t know when he’s become so homesick.

At some point, Freddie joins him. He notices the cloud of smoke seemingly enveloping the small table, and silently takes the last one in the pack, without much protest from Roger.

They smoke in silence.

* * *

It’s three in the morning, and the three of them, sans Freddie, are sitting in the communal kitchen and revising. Well, Brian is. Whatever John and Roger are doing is up to debate at this point, but it’s clearly nothing productive given that at least one of them has had his books upside down for the last twenty minutes.

Roger is absolutely _plastered_. “How is it that this feels like the _worst_ bloody hangover I’ve had, and yet the only thing I’ve been drinking is coffee.” He turns to look at Brian, whose face is completely obscured by his notes, the movement of his locks being the only indication that he heard Roger speak.

“Well Rog, there is this thing called _sleep deprivation_ , you might have heard of it.”, replies Brian’s hair, surprisingly annoyed for a non-sentient object. “Shouldn’t you know this? You’re the biology major.”

“I could tell you everything about the chemical structure of heroin and the biosynthesis of fatty acids, but not a single treatment for the common cold right now.” He mumbles into the table, eyes drooping downwards.

“I’m so glad you decided to not be a doctor.” The table creaks under the weight of his arms, as Brian tries to shake off his tiredness and migrate away from the kitchen.

“Oh, sod off.” He manages to open one eye. “I could have been so rich.”

He hears the sound of a thick book slamming shut. “And you’d have so many casualties on your hands as a GP, let alone a _dentist_.” 

Roger’s gaze follows Brian as he tries not to tumble over his legs on the way out “The world just isn’t ready for my brilliance yet, you’re a prime example of that- Where are you going?” 

“To sleep.”

John’s forehead slowly slides into view. His eyes look as worn out and abused as the textbook, and they close as his head hits the kitchen table. The dog-eared thing flops towards Roger.

Having decided that he’s had more than enough biochemistry for today, he abandons his studies completely, and absentmindedly flips through “Electrical Engineering and Radio Technology: An Introduction”. His stops on a particular chapter.

It takes a minute for the letters on the page to form words, and another ten for them to make sense, but eventually, after a few struggling read-throughs, he begins to understand the paragraph.

“Hey,” No reply. “Deaks.” Silence. “D’you reckon we could construct a radio?”

Drowsiness seems to have completely overtaken him, given that he’s currently using a pencil case as a pillow. “Wha-at.”

Roger tries to shake him awake. “It says it here, in your coursebook. “Shortwave radio”, supposed to have a range of a couple thousand kilometres, or something.” He points at a crude drawing of a radio in his textbook.

“Cant… you just… use a normal on-“

He interjects and shakes John once again. “ _No,_ stop being so daft. I wanna hear what they’re playing in Moscow.”

This only deepens John’s confusion. “…You, uh,” _Yawn._ “want to listen in on the Soviets?” His eyes blink separately.

“Sure,” Brian seems to have overheard their conversation, head ducking back into the kitchen. “Don’t you want to know what songs they’re playing over the curtain?”

* * *

After a few weeks of work and a lot of favours, John and Brian are putting the final touches on their homegrown concoction of a radio, while Roger hopelessly tries to follow along, and Freddie, being about as tech-savvy as one would imagine an art student to be, stands nearby and watches. Finally, they’re done.

“If you want the signal to reach even further, tune in at night.” One of them explains, though Roger doesn’t bother to understand the why’s and how’s of it. Biology was enough of a hassle for him to stop trying to comprehend anything else about the world.

“…This is the standard for ‘em, as far as I know. You should be able to hear any station from East Berlin to Norilsk.”

“Where did you find the parts for this?” He asks mostly out of politeness, and John’s too tired to give him a proper answer.

“Where do you think I got my amp? You just have to do some digging.”

They step aside, letting Roger press the switch, a small LED flickering on the back of the radio. The room is strewn with a low, fluctuating hum, and the four huddle around it in the living room, like a bunch of curious schoolchildren. It takes two pairs of hands to fiddle with the short antennas and mess with the settings before they finally start to hear something.

“This is just the BBC again!”

* * *

After bickering, drinking, and singing, Roger’s left with his own thoughts and the screeches of the railway. The train is strangely empty. The further they ride, the more the streetlights begin to flicker and die, crying for maintenance, and the glam of the inner districts fades, as Greater London and its industrials and suburbs begin to take shape. He’s not interested in the last rays of the sunset or the beer bottle in his bag, all he wants to do is sleep.

When he opens his eyes again, the outside is practically submerged in indigo, the occasional orange glow weakly illuminating the thick dark. He feels heavy and slow. So much so that he almost ignores the peculiar strut of someone’s boots, a mixture of a clicking pen and a heavy boot. He manages to sit upright, and turns his head.

But he can’t get a good look before something, or _someone,_ slams him against the window.

The knuckles holding him tremble, before he climbs on the seat, hitting him against the windowpane once more. The pain slowly spreads through Roger’s joints, and though he’s aware that he’s about to get mugged, beaten or _worse_ , what clears his head is the punching odour from the man’s heavy breathing. Everything inside him wants to shrivel up and die. 

There’s a knife to his neck now.

What happens next is a blur.

Roger takes a deep breath, stretching his arms across the width of the cabin.

He’s been trying to run away from this for months, desperately clinging to the notion that everything’s changed. That it’s behind him. But alas, the world seems to have other plans.

It’s a lot like playing the drums, when you think about it. Given such a bad rep, all about your brute force and temper. Almost _offensive_ how little credit these crafts are given, as if it all comes from nothing, and doesn’t take years to master. Just as when he’s loud and energetic on stage, he moves to a dictated tempo and makes no unneeded noise, circling the man like a hyena. Not long now.

There’s a feeling at the back of his throat, a feeling he’s become quite familiar with ever since his first training days, and he tries his hardest to ignore it. He thinks about his medical classes, dissecting plants and frogs and dead bodies. He is nothing more than a breathing dummy.

The man with the patchy beard hit the floor roughly twenty seconds ago, and as he tries to regain composure and aimlessly feels the ground for his knife, his painful wails almost cancelling out the screeches of the road, Roger’s waiting. The drummer’s in no rush, really. He has all the time in the world to adjust his collar, check his shoelaces and check the faulty swiss army knife in his hand. The bureau never supplies them with good weapons, he contemplates as he tries to twirl the battered thing like a drumstick. But maybe that’s a good thing. A slick and handy weapon is something you get attached to, pretty to look at, with personality and quality to boost. Not something you could “accidentally” leave in a dump somewhere or toss a civilian. 

In a last plea, the not-quite-bearded man grips Roger’s leg, trying with all his might to pull him down, and smash a couple of his teeth in presumably, but to no avail. They make eye contact.

Roger leaves the tube alone.

**Author's Note:**

> lmk if you'd be interested in a full story!


End file.
